Fabric, Startup Building ‘VPU’ Chips for Cryptography, Raises $33M

Additionally involved in the investment were Offchain Labs, Polygon, and Matter Labs. The project had earlier secured $6 million during a seed round that was spearheaded by Metaplanet. Fabric, the company behind this project, was established by dropouts from MIT and Stanford – Michael Gao and Tina Ju – as well as hardware industry veterans like Sagar Reddy, as stated in a press release.

According to the company’s statement, the newly acquired funds will be dedicated towards designing computer chips, developing software, and creating encryption techniques (or codes).

The core of Fabric’s plan features a novel processing component, referred to as the “Verifiable Processing Unit” (VPU), specifically designed for handling cryptographic tasks, as per the project description.

Companies are developing new computing chips to handle rising use from AI – with its heavy demand for fast computation from graphics processing units, or GPUs – as well as cryptography-intensive blockchain applications.

In a recent announcement, Fabric explained that their VPU (Video Processing Unit) is the first custom silicon chip designed with an instruction set architecture tailored for cryptography. This implies that any cryptographic algorithm can be disassembled into its fundamental mathematical components, which are then accelerated and natively supported by the chip itself.

The new chips are slated to go into production later this year, Fabric said.

According to the announcement, VPUs (Variable-Precision Units) are expected to significantly enhance the speed and reduce costs associated with executing complex cryptographic tasks, surpassing CPUs, GPUs, and dedicated cryptography solutions. In essence, they’re predicted to revolutionize cryptography in much the same way that Nvidia’s GPUs and numerous other startup chips have transformed AI (Artificial Intelligence).